Garth Brooks Gushes Over ‘Beautiful, Talented’ Lady Gaga

Ahead of his CBS concert specialGarth: Live at Notre Dame on Sunday (Dec. 2), Garth Brooks made a visit to the set of The Late Show on Thursday (Nov. 29), where he gushed over fellow music superstar Lady Gaga.

"She's beautiful, she’s talented, she's everything you want her to be," Brooks says of the A Star Is Born actress. "I loved her on [A Star is Born]; I thought she was beautiful inside and out."

When asked by host Stephen Colbert if he felt as if the movie — which also stars Bradley Cooper — is authentic, the country icon didn’t think twice.

"If you want to know really what the music business and entertainment is like, that movie is one of them that I would say go see and you’ll get a pretty good dose of it," Brooks says. “Whoever had their hands on the wheel — and I’m thinking, it’s Miss Gaga, actually — it was authentic as hell."

Brooks also stuck around to talk about his days before superstardom — days that were often spent in college dreaming of a possible future in sports.

"The only thing that stopped me was my professional athlete ability," laughs Brooks, who actually was a javelin thrower at Oklahoma State University. Colbert even shared a pic of a much younger Brooks in his javelin-throwing heyday.

See the 5 Best Moments from Garth at Notre Dame

But soon, fate would step in and, after realizing he was short one hour from graduation, Brooks decided to take a walk to a saloon in the hopes of playing music.

They let him play one night. "Then one night turned into two nights, three nights; and pretty soon I was playing like Monday through Friday all over town," Brooks recalls. "And all of the sudden, I was going, ‘Hey, maybe this is what you’re supposed to be doing,’"

The best part of it all? "I said, 'Wait a minute — I can feed myself and feed somebody I love doing something that isn't a job?' Count me in on this one."